The analysis of site-specific farming data is a complex task involving various characteristics of a field, known and unknown interactions between those characteristics, and the processing of large amounts of data. Current systems do not always provide easy-to-use tools for analyzing site-specific data in a flexible manner. The inability to correlate characteristics with each other may prevent the discovery of relationships and interactions between different characteristics that occur within fields. The inability to discover relationships may result in farming inputs being applied in a less than optimal manner, resulting in increased costs, reduced crop yield or excess environmental damage. The inability to quantitatively analyze the effect of farming inputs on yield may prevent the performance of an informed cost-benefit analysis to determine the optimum approach to take. In addition, the lack of flexible analysis tools may discourage a farmer from "experimenting" by applying certain farming inputs and determining the effect on field characteristics including yield since the farmer may not be able to fully analyze the results.
For example, a farmer may want to experiment by laying out several plots in a field which correspond to different levels or types of farming inputs, gather harvesting data associated with each of these plots, and then easily analyze the data to determine which farming inputs result in the greatest yield or cost margin. It would be desirable to provide a system wherein, as a field is harvested by a harvesting vehicle (e.g., a combine), each pass through the field is automatically assigned a value so that various statistics (e.g., yield and moisture content data) are calculated for each pass through the field. Thus, the farmer could obtain precise statistical data for any pass through the field, including average yield and average moisture content data for an identified pass. It would be desirable to provide tools for analyzing farming data on a pass-by-pass basis.
It would be desirable to assign values to the passes by automatically incrementing the number assigned to the current pass each time the combine header is raised above a predetermined height. Thus, when a pass extends through the length of the field, the pass number will be automatically incremented when the operator raises the header at the headland of the field. However, a farmer may want to lay out his experimental plots such that there is more than one pass through the length of a field, or such that a single pass does not extend for the entire length of the field. In this situation, it would also be desirable to allow the farmer to manually cause the pass number to be incremented by raising and then lowering the header to indicate the starting and ending locations of the pass. Thus, a farmer could lay out one, or several, experimental plots within the length of a field, and then generate statistics for each individual pass using the header to signal starting and ending locations of each pass. Unfortunately, current systems do not include the ability to easily analyze and manipulate data on a pass-by-pass basis. Currently, the farmer is required to fully specify the location of each plot prior to analyzing the data. It would be desirable to eliminate the need to manually enter location data for plots.